BY AARON R. HANLON Aaron R. Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College The public is right to care about what kinds of values our institutions of higher education are (and are not) imparting to students. People are likely to disagree over which particular values they think colleges and universities ought to emphasize—in…
BY CHRISTOPHER SIMEONE Registration for the 2019 AAUP/AAUP-CBC Summer Institute is open! Join us July 25–28 at Roosevelt University in Chicago. View the complete program and reserve your spot. Summer Institute is a four-day workshop series that connects you with academic activists and develops your skills so you can make change on campus. Defend the…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN In late March 2019 at UNC–Chapel Hill, the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East and Islamic Studies held a conference titled “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities.” The list of scholars, journalists, performers, artists, and films can be found here. On the first night of the conference, Tamer Nafar, a rapper, actor,…
BY FRANK D. LOMONTE Headhunters for university presidential searches make their six-figure commissions by promising trustees they’ll deliver an efficient search with high-quality candidates. What they’ve delivered to the University of Colorado is a slow-motion train wreck, as president-elect Mark Kennedy struggles to salvage his candidacy after a “ready-fire-aim” search process in which trustees admit…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When some conservative media outlet contacts you, with a picture of a lecture slide or assignment from your course, implying a bias against their conservative agenda, do you respond? If so, how? I am not imagining a hypothetical scenario. The headlines of conservative websites such as Campus Reform and College Fix suggest…
BY COLLEEN DALY MARTINEZ WITH MARIAN AHN THORPE The part-time lecturer (PTL) unit of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union is fighting for longer, more secure contracts, salary increases, and healthcare for PTLs. The full-time faculty and graduate unit reached a tentative agreement on April 16. Marian Ahn Thorpe, a graduate member of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, interviewed PTL…
BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. To read his previous post on the cash-for-admission scandals see Bleeding Meritocracy: Responding to the Admissions Scandal as Outrage Fades. The admissions scandal…
BY MONICA BLACK, BEN LEE, AND MARY MCALPIN Ever since students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, began organizing an annual event called Sex Week, state lawmakers have been trying to kill it. According to the students who organize it, the aim of Sex Week, which ran from March 31 to April 5 this year,…
BY JULIE SCHMID As we move into the final months of the academic year, I wanted to share updates about three recent wins. These three successes emphasize the power of collective action and solidarity—among chapter members; among the national AAUP and our state conferences and chapters; and among faculty, students, and the community—when we all…
BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AND PAUL DAVIS As we shared with members in December 2018, the AAUP Council and the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress Executive Committee voted in November to move forward with changes that will streamline our shared organizational structure. Following that vote, these governing bodies directed that detailed revisions to governing documents and other…